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Aug 23, 2006

Hey, the book is listed!

Filip over at bnxt.com emailed me to let me know that my book has shown up on Amazon.ca and Amazon.fr for pre-orders - I have no idea why it's not showing at Amazon.com.

Anyway, the book is called "LEGO Mindstorms NXT: The Mayan Adventure" and the book is targeted at ages 10 and up. No official pagecount yet, but it'll probably be over 300 pages. The book is a little different in that it uses a fictional storyline to setup situations where a NXT robot can 'save the day' so-to-speak. Each of the 5 bots has complete building instructions and programming instructions, but with commentary and explanations which I hope readers will appreciate... I don't just say "Click here" and set this to 50... I explain WHY my bots are built and programmed the way they are...

5 comments:

Jim - the book sounds like it will be quite engaging for your target. Nice one!

As to Amazon - each country site has its own database, and this gets updated with data from the local distributors. The Amazon sites do international sales but there does not seem to be much internal distribution.

The only exceptions I have noticed are some language materials and US DVDs.

I've included some nice surprises in the book... I wanted to write a book for kids, but I think there are a LOT of adults who will find it useful as well. I'm very proud of all the bots in the book, but there's one in particular that is just an absolute favorite of mine... but I won't say which one because I don't want to give anything away...

There are plenty of appendices and some "sneak peeks" included in there as well... tons of screenshots for the programming sections and every bot has a HUGE amount of visual instructions.

Trust me, it's not too late to start writing a book. There are only 4 books that I know of that are scheduled for release in the next 4-5 months for the NXT.

As for getting published, that's a tougher question. Obviously you have to have a good idea for a book and it needs to be different enough from what else is out there... writing ability is also somewhat required (especially for new authors), but I've edited over 100 technical books in the past 8 years and I can tell you that lack of spelling and grammar skills hasn't kept some writers from getting books published - the publisher just gets a good editor to clean up the book (but this is usually only true for popular authors).

This is only my 2nd book published (last one was back in 2003) so please don't take anything I say here as law... there are probably always exceptions.

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